Friday, 23 December 2016

Six hours of taxi, train, plane and car rides and I came home for the
holidays. To a house I’ve lived in for three years, to a family I know inside
out. To a real Christmas tree (we’ve always had fake) with familiar ornaments
looped around branches, intricate ballet shoes I remember Mum and I buying at
our local garden centre about a decade ago. This is the first year I wasn’t around to help
decorate.

“It’s good to have you home.”

“It’s good to be home.”

And it is. Bathtub bubbles kiss my skin and my muscles loosen in the
absence of dish-washing and hauling dirty clothes to and from the laundrette. But
yet, my bedroom echoes that of a hotel: my candles aren’t in my bedside drawer and
my hairbands aren’t on my bathroom counter. The living room sofas are still
yellow leather and battered, but they’re not positioned like they were three
months ago. Maybe it was naïve of me to believe nothing would’ve changed for,
after all, I’m not the same either.

“How’s university?” attempted small talk from people I once knew – some with
faces more familiar than others.

“Insane,” I say – a mediocre attempt to offer every answer that fits:
incredible, blurry, challenging, sleepless, comfortable, uncomfortable, weird. Halls
that you learn to love despite their purple carpets and dim lightbulbs. A
kitchen you manoeuvre through perpetual crumbs and unidentified spillages and
lack of counter space.

“Where are you from?” is a paradox of a question. Seems simple – a slip-off-the-tongue
answer, until your birthplace clashes with your primary school and adolescence ships
you across seas. Now, “where is home?” can be added to the list of unanswerable
questions. For home is both there and here. Home is four walls and wide windows
with transparent curtains, but it is also childhood photo albums and board game
cupboards and a double bed. Home is Mum’s oven smells and four simultaneous
saucepans of boiling pasta. Home is friends old and new. Home is Moscow’s hospital
rooms and Bicester’s bike lanes and Barcelona’s sea skies and Norwich’s mist
over cobbled lanes.

Home doesn’t have to be a bedroom or a family house, doesn’t need an
arrivals lounge or a train station. Home is wherever feels like it. Wherever
smile tattoos are free of charge and wherever laughs crimson your cheeks and
make your stomach ache. Home is good food and even better company. Home isn’t
tangible, nor does it have to be visible. Sometimes, it cannot be put into
words.

Monday, 19 September 2016

The absence of harsh seasons – an autumn that blends into spring,
skimming over the cruel temperatures that characterise typical winter months. A
place where twenty-five-degree weather is jacket weather, where the slightest
embrace of a breeze merits a woollen scarf.

Restaurants that boast a variety of tapas, each waiter competing to lure
you into theirs for lunches that seep into late afternoons and dinners that
begin after the moon has risen. Markets scattered around neighbourhoods, tinted
with a vibrancy that no camera can attempt to capture. Fruit fresher than folded
laundry: crimson tomatoes with a look that almost beats their taste. Almost.

Architecture the rest of Europe should envy, buildings stained with
colour on the outside and history on the inside. Gaudi tattooed himself over
every brick, his portrait still visible in the mosaic tiles, if one knows how
to look. Concrete streets flow like rivers to the Mediterranean shore – beaches
that gift views of the mountains, those just a short drive away. Not only the
best of both worlds, but the best of all three.

The perpetual echo of multiple languages, a foreground shared by Spanish
and Catalan, but a background that’ll make any nationality feel welcome. Areas
that seduce tourists neighbour those that house locals, a labyrinth one can
weave their way in and out of.

Sunday morning cyclists and dog-walkers, kids kicking footballs as hard
as they dream to meet the players that inspired them to do so. You don’t have
to watch the Barça matches to know when there’s a home goal – the neighbourhood
erupts in a collective cheer.

Holidays of human towers, giant puppets, fire-breathing dragons, and streets
littered with sweets. Lipstick is replaced with wine; perfume lost in a
lingering cloud of beer. A culture that might not be universal, but constitutes
a universe of its own.

Mastering the art of patience, discovering the comfort in waiting rooms
and eavesdropping on the conversations of the customers ahead of you to make
the delay that little more entertaining.

Club nights that morph into seaside mornings, sun rising higher as feet
sink ever deeper into the sand. Not a city that never sleeps (for snores sound through
Sundays and post-lunchtime siestas) but one that, when awake, has a heartbeat that
vibrates beneath the bricks and tiles.

Friends from countries I’ve never set foot in, born over oceans, with
backgrounds opposite to my own. But laughter parallels between cultures. So
does love. They’re friends I’m not sure what I did to deserve, those for whom
words fail to do justice. You know who you are.

A home away from home. A city that will not only have a permanent place
in my heart, but one that has soaked into my skin and coated my lungs in ways
that only settings where one has spent their formative years can. Thank you for
six unbelievable years, Barcelona. I’ll be back.

Tuesday, 13 September 2016

“What’s that?” His finger resembled a knife as it tickled my thigh –
because pointing wasn’t enough, a poke was needed to confirm the lines were not
just a figment of his imagination.

“Stretch marks.”

“What?” His tone was one of combined casualness and curiosity: the marks
appeared to be coloured with crayon or chalk, but he recognised a permanence that
couldn’t be erased.

“Stretch marks,” a repetition uttered through my teeth.

“What are those?”

As if the name wasn’t self-explanatory.

A wave of embarrassment surged, the lingering remains of an insecure
young girl surfaced. My mind flashed back to the neon crop tops other girls
paraded – those I’d never dare to don.

I can’t blame the boy - I myself spent hours pondering the marks’
existence, wondering why the burden was mine. For before acceptance comes
denial: trousers long enough to mask my upper legs, bikinis a forbidden item in
my closet.

And after denial comes anger. My fire eyes burned through the marks I
saw as scars, where swords had scratched – weapons that belonged to a battle I hadn’t
volunteered to fight. Except swords would have drawn blood, and blood would
have meant release. But there was none of that, and there wouldn’t be. They
were tattoos that lasers refused to remove – permanent.

As nature has it, all waves subside. The embarrassment ebbed and
gratitude grew. For these matters merit upbringing – blazes of controversy that
shouldn’t be extinguished. Maybe if there wasn’t such a taboo around the issue,
maybe if young adults were taught to take pride in their skin and every mark on
it, their fingers wouldn’t be rubbed red, sore from attempting to erase that
which they cannot.

When I asked my nine-year-old sister what she thought of stretch marks,
she shrugged as if I’d asked her about tree bark or orange peel.

“Do you think they’re normal?”

She nodded with a certainty of which only children are capable. It might
be time to bottle this positivity and sprinkle it over pubescent adolescents.

The first result of a Google search on stretch marks concerns their
treatment. The second, their prevention. And the worst part is that these
results cease to surprise me. For it is typical of our society to conceal that
which makes us undeniably human. From the foundation caked onto our cheeks to plastic
nails we glue over real ones, the entire premise of the cosmetics industry is
to convince us that we need fixing. But you’re not broken. No matter how far
you were stretched, you didn’t shatter. You, and your skin, made it.

For when one’s skin stretches, it must be a sign that they had more to
give. More love inside them perhaps, dreams that were wider, goals that couldn’t
shrink themselves to the restrictions of their body. They wanted to take up a
little more space in this world, and the world allowed them to do so.

In primary school assemblies we sang about fruit: “beetroot purple and
onions white,” praising the colours of inanimate objects. Maybe it’s time to
value the shades of our own bodies: whether purple, pink, red, white, or grey.

Stretch marks are strikes of lightning. Because you are a thunderstorm,
not a drizzle, downpour that makes everyone wish they’d brought their umbrella.
They are the lines that join puzzle pieces, to prove that you are not just a
fragment in God’s game, but an entire jigsaw he put together. When chocolate
chip cookies bake, their surfaces are jagged, not smooth, as if the oven
refuses to produce perfection. Maybe it knows there is no such thing. Stretch
marks are the creases in the corners of a paperback, those that signify the
book is worth reading. Your body is a novel layered with complex sentences and
three-dimensional characters. Inside are themes that matter. You are art: a
carved sculpture, an oil painting. You deserve to be displayed in museums, unveiled
in galleries for the world to see.

Let those marks kiss you, let them lick your thighs and your stomach,
let them caress your breasts and hips and your upper arms. Embrace them like
tattoos designed for you, those you might not have chosen, but those that don’t
deserve removal.

The next time someone asks about my stretch marks, I’ll smile, widen my
lips to reveal the gap between my two front teeth, and say “they’re a prize.”